Despite the hardships, the pandemic still proved to be a catalyst for fresh thoughts and ideas. Though not an entirely new concept, one of the things that flourished this year is digital events. Thanks to holding such online discussions and presentations, people got to push through the gatherings we are supposedly forbidden to attend because of strict health restrictions. Speaker and investor Ken Krell joins Juliet Clark in discussing how digital events work in the new normal and how it can be appropriately leveraged in a business setting. Ken explains how these will continue to grow in 2021 and why it is here to stay for good, thanks to its share of interesting benefits, particularly in maximizing time and energy.
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Make Better Through Digital Events With Ken Krell
Before we get started, remember to go over to YouTube and subscribe to our channel. All of these people that are on, I know you’re listening on your podcast but if you want to see them and see what they look like, I’m sure you’ll know a lot of them, go over to YouTube and subscribe to us at Superbrand Publishing. Don’t forget to take our quiz, PromoteProfitPublishQuiz.com and find out if you’re ready to publish. Do you have all the Ps and Qs in order to have a successful launch? I bet most of you don’t have an audience built yet. Go find out about that. Our guest is so much fun. We always get off on these conversations. I’m not even sure where we go half the time. He’s my little spirit animal. He reminds me of my dad.
My dad and I used to walk in the mornings and we would have these conversations that anybody else who was involved would be like, “Did you communicate? Where did that go?” Ken and I are like that. He wrote this himself, most people would say 30 years but for over a third of a century, Ken Krell has inspired thousands of people from all over the world by sharing powerful ways to create wealth, prosperity, and happiness in their lives. Ken is most known as the producer of the OpportunityThon, the world-record setting 28.5-hour live marathon broadcast that featured over 55 of the world’s leading authorities on business mindset and success.
The event reached thousands all over the globe and is the cornerstone of LiveConferenceTV.com. LCTV is known for PRIDE, Producing Ridiculously Irresistible Digital Events. Ken’s three-day PRIDE experience gives attendees the tools needed to pivot from the physical to digital stage. How many of you need to hear this? We all thought that COVID was going away and apparently not. Ken is the founder of driving force behind Wealth Spring strategies, www.WealthSpringUSA.com. He and his team helped American taxpayers and foreign entities subject to US taxes protect their assets, legally defer their taxes, maintain their privacy, and create more prosperous lifestyles.
Ken produced World Love Week, a virtual event focused on helping business owners as a force for good and other multi-speaker digital events including the World InfoMastery Summit, the World Speakers Summit, the World Authors Conference, and the World Chiro Conference. He’s been respected for decades as an expert in niche marketing strategies in real estate mortgage financing businesses. He has founded and operated several successful real estate investment mortgage banking firms. Ken has extensively traveled and has spoken on stages around the world from the USA to Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong, Thailand, the Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia, India, Singapore, and more. Welcome, Ken.
How are you?
I’m good. How are you?
It’s good to see you again.
We’re going to talk about events because many of us had to move from physical stages, traveling, hotels, bad food, and no exercise to online summits. You do them well. Tell us about them.
Digital Events: The whole COVID situation has created massive challenges for people and destroyed families.
You’re taking my whole pitch. It’s true. The people that are making money and are being successful in 2020 pivoted to digital. Those that haven’t yet because they’re afraid or whatever, we’ll talk about how to get over that. I’m on my dining room table. I gave you the tour before we started. If you pivot the camera to the right, there’s my kitchen. If you pivot the camera to my left, there’s this beautiful view of the city. I’m going to do this and when I’m done with this, I’m on another interview, then I’m on another one. The bottom line is that on digital stages, we can maximize our time so much better.
I’m a traveler. I’ve been traveling for years to different cities. There’s all that and that’s wonderful. When you’re a speaker and you’re traveling, the time that you’re on the airplane, in Uber to the airport, waiting for your baggage, or waiting for the delayed plane is dead downtime. If you’re thinking you’re doing a one-hour event in Cleveland to US audience, you’re still flying from wherever it is. You’ve lost at least 1 or 2 days. For me, being here on the Asia Pacific side of the planet, anywhere I go is a long flight.
When I was living in Bangkok, let’s say I went back to the States to speak, it’s not only a 24-hour flying time but it’s also jet lag. It’s about 24 hours each way. It’s a disaster on the body. The opportunity to call is gigantic. My friend, Casey Everhart told me that during my last PRIDE event, he was on nine other stages during my weekend. Typically, when he was emceeing an event, he’d do more and that will be it. He’s made X dollars. The ability for us as a speaker from the logistics side is gigantic. From the economics, we’re not paying for airplanes, and hotel, crappy food no matter where you’re eating. It’s not the food that you’re making at home that’s healthy and nutritious. Assuming you eat healthy and nutritious, it’s never a conversation.
You’re not away from your family which is okay. Right now, everyone wants to get away from their family because you’d been locked up with them for so long. You may get the point, the whole ability to not have spent all those thousands of dollars is gigantic. To the other side of it, your audience at a physical event has to get there. They’ve got the hotel expense, travel expense, time away from the family, kids, and all that, then you’ve got, “Do they want to travel that far?”
If you’re in Topeka, and you want to run an event, first of all, you have to run into Topeka because it’s not a hub city. You’ve got to go somewhere else with your team so you’ve got all those expenses, plus the hotel expense for the meeting room, food, and all that. Plus, the printing because the secretary delivers it to everybody, and the extra staff you have to have. If somebody is from Pretoria, South Africa, are they going to attend? Probably not, but when you’re digital, all the people in Pretoria, Nairobi, or pick a town in Spain, they’re there. The last PRIDE event I did was from fourteen countries. That was light. The beauty of us being able to go around the world is gigantic.
We have a bigger audience at less cost which gives it more of an opportunity to maximize and monetize. I love those words, maximize and monetize. That gives you the freedom of flexibility. The big question is, how do you do it in a way that keeps people engaged especially now? How do you get people to sit down and stay seated in front of you? I don’t like people sitting a lot so I have them stand up, move around, and we dance a little bit. I’m not a dancer. I bring someone to help me with that. We do things that engage them. The cool thing is you don’t need to spend a lot of money. That’s the thing.
Juliet, you asked me, what kind of backdrop we’re using? Palm trees. For those of you that live in the South, I live in Fort Lauderdale. We’d have to chop them down all the time to get through. I’m in Sydney and these were expensive. Those trees were $139 Australia which translates to about $89 less. They’re big but nice backdrops. You don’t even have to have this but adaptively, you can be anywhere. I’ve upgraded my camera. My first PRIDE event was done with a GoPro. You can use your iPhone or webcam, whatever you want. You have what you need with Zoom. When I teach people how to do their events, I want to mitigate all the fear that goes with tech. A tech concern is an excuse because you can do all. Right now, you can do your event. Frankly, at the end of the day, nobody cares about your technology. They care about you and your message. I’m not watching you, Juliet, because of your backdrop. I’m watching you because you’re freaking awesome.
Do you like my backdrop?
Digital stages allow us to maximize our time so much better. Click To TweetIt’s adorable but I don’t watch you for the backdrop. You look awesome.
This is why I have him on. He’s always full of compliments and I eat them up. I don’t care what he has to say, just keep complimenting me.
It’s hitting all at once. Stroke your host. You look awesome. The whole key is to show up, be real, be fun, and people will buy into you. When I say buy into you, I’m not talking about money. They will buy and enroll into your energy, enthusiasm, and messaging. At the end of the day, it’s your message that matters. If they accept, enroll, buy into your message, whichever terminology you want to use, then they will want to go further with you because they fall in love with you. The big key of what I teach people is how to get them fall in love with you because there is a model for that. You and I talked about this before when we’ve spoken, Juliet. There is a dance. I get people to do three-day events and understand I’ve been doing this for decades.
He lied about the third. It’s more almost 40%. You probably lie about your age too, don’t you?
I’m proud of my age. The problem is I’m the oldest person in the room most of the time. It’s like, “What the hell is this?” I’m coming out with a fitness program. Are you kidding me?
It’s funny you said that because one author that launched is Jane Fonda’s personal trainer. She writes at great timing. When COVID hit, she already had this in the work. She released a fitness program that you can do at home through online subscription. There’s a place for you, Ken.
It’s fabulous. I’ve been working on that for a couple of years, and then I got off the train.
Didn’t we all? I got the little ice cream pooch from COVID.
Digital Events: The digital society today is so much more connected and dedicated than in the past decades.
The beautiful thing is no one can see that. I had a nice shirt on, I’m wearing shorts, and flip flops. It’s like TV newscasters. They’ve always been doing this. They’ve always had shorts because no one see it below the desk. You have what you need. The key is understanding how to dance the dance. In our three-day model, one thing is don’t bang on the mic because people hear that. When you do the three-day model, your objective is to build rapport, have them fall in love with you. If they want more, you invite them to join you on the journey.
If you invite them too soon, they will hate you. If you invite them too late, you’ll hate yourself. You have to learn how to do that in appropriate way and not do it in a tactless easy manner. You do it to the degree where they’d be crazy not to continue with you because the love fest is awesome. When you’re in that state, you and I do our thing, but now we’re not working. This is technically work, it’s business with a business purpose but we’re having a great time. We always do it together. That’s the journey I want your audience to be on. That’s what people chose to do because when you stop pushing, when you stop being fake, you come from authenticity. The information you want to give out are coming from good source. I don’t want to sound so heavy.
This is so woo-woo.
That’s true because we would invite essential through authenticity and you’re not working anymore. That’s the beautiful thing. I love my PRIDE events. When we do that, I love it. For me, most of the time, I’m on the other side of the world whether it be in Bangkok, Sydney or wherever I happened to be these days. It’s usually nighttime and overnight. I don’t care. It’s fun. I’ll stay up all night and I’ll teach. It’s fabulous. I have a high-end coaching program. It is a joy. I keep giving them my bonus sessions. I love them because it’s fun. If I’m by myself, I’m bored, “Let’s go do something guys.” You’re in that state and you are not coming from having to work. In the past, when I was in coaching programs, it was a labor, not a labor of love. Now, it’s a different ballgame because I got the right audience because they want what I have. They want to make that pivot and recognize how do I build the bigger audiences global without leaving the comfort of my home. How do I turn my bedroom into a profit center?
I know how to do that. Do you need some coaching? I’m going to be one of those coaches who has never done what I’m talking about but don’t worry about it. I got this.
I’m teaching programs in either. You could teach how to pole dance in school. Put up a pole and do a video of you doing it if you can.
Have you ever tried pole dancing?
I have not. However, I’m going to circus school now and I’m doing circus.
Nobody really cares about your technology. They care about you and your message. Click To TweetIt’s hard. I always had this vision that these out of shape, druggy girls who are prostitutes were the ones who pole dance. When I tried it, there is no way that I could do drugs, not be in shape, and do that. A little respect there.
I started doing circus and it’s my first experience. It’s like Cirque du Soleil. You’re climbing up and then they’re doing all the acrobatics in the air. It’s gorgeous and beautiful. I got to do it. It’s hard. Handstand upside down is scary but it’s the best workout ever because you’re not doing a chest press or a shoulder press, you’re doing stuff that you physically have to do. You can’t move your legs without a solid core. It’s different. They said to me, “You need to go around that.” I’m like, “It’s not going.” There’s a reason to stretch. Before, stretching was like, “That’s something I’m told to do.” Now, it’s like, “I can’t do that move.” It’s a different mindset. Years ago, I lived in Atlanta and it was cool and fun. You could do a pole dancing training from here as long as you can make own pole to stick in their home and practice. You can do that. My mom is doing Zoom yoga.
I thought you were going to say your mom is too pole dancing. I’m saying like, “What?”
She possibly could. She’s old and she was unstoppable. She’s running around South Florida. It’s a different conversation altogether.
His mom is his little bestie.
She’s my best friend ever. We did a video of her and me in a sizzle reel. In the beginning I’ve got pictures of her and I found all these videos. If you have an Apple device, sometimes they’ll give you a retrospective like some pictures from the past that you like. If you click, you can have a 30 second or up to four-minute video with music. We’re on the phone and I’m facetiming her. I’m sharing my screen with her. There are pictures of us in this album. She said, “It looks like you’re celebrating my funeral.”
Now that you mentioned it, we did that for both of my parents’ funerals.
I told my mom, “We’ve only kick-off, guess what we’re doing?”
Digital Events: Online events give the ability to serve people globally and reach a vast audience that you may never be able to do before.
A lot of people are afraid of the technology and a lot of times you have to use Zoom webinar, but you can bring an assistant in to run that for you while you’re doing this if you’re not comfortable. I’m perfectly comfortable doing it. I remember at the beginning, my assistant used to come in and man the chat, and do all those things while I was presenting. There are workarounds that are in that technology.
There’s Zoom webinar and Zoom meeting. I love Zoom meeting and the big reason is I can see you. When I do an event, I always use Zoom meeting. Now people can be on. I can have them dancing, and we cannot see each other. Zoom webinars is like you’ll go to a webinar to the degree that you can’t see their faces. They can see and hear you. The only way you can communicate with them is in chat. The little hack I have is that if you have a little team and audience, use Zoom webinar. If you’re doing training, use Zoom meeting. All my trainings are in Zoom meeting.
I use Zoom webinar but I let everybody come on. You bring up a good point about the dancing. We did an event, Peace & Pivot, back in April 2020, and we had a happy hour, wine tasting, and magician. The magician goes from Zoom call to Zoom call. Corporations are paying her to liven up their meetings.
She can pitch and making more money now than ever before. As a disclosure, no question that the whole COVID situation has created massive challenges for people and destroyed families. A lot of people have died. I want to acknowledge that because when we talk about the great stuff that’s come from this, I don’t want anyone to think that we’re not being sensitive. People have died because of this. With any negative, when the forest burns down, there must be growth that comes from that. I want to focus on what you do after the devastation. You have to grow. That’s the opportunity.
I want to be mindful of that. We’ve had disappointments and that’s the understatement of the century, disappointments. The beautiful thing is we have a Zoom meeting and you don’t have to run it yourself. You can absolutely. I will tell you that my PRIDE event, I don’t run it myself. I have a producer in the States and I do that because I don’t want to be focused on technology at all during my event or my students focused on that either. I want them to focus on the presentation, on what the delivery is.
If something goes down and it will, at some point, there’s my team to do it. It’s not cheap if you use a service. I have a professional service that does this because to me it’s the economics of an event. These events can make you a lot of money. Take a look at my friend, Kim, her first event had 100 people in the room. She sold tickets at $97 apiece. That’s about $10,000 but she sold over $250,000 of products and services. It’s more than that at this point. Her second event is significantly more than that. I’m not going to go into those numbers. That should impress you on what can be done in three days.
I’ll take you down to another level. A one-day event with one of my students, Pam, didn’t exactly do it the way I recommended. All the things she could do wrong, she did. She had a whopping eleven tickets sold. You think, “God, this is a disaster.” They’re $25 a ticket. They all went to a charity. Eight people showed up. She had multiple speakers during the day which I don’t typically advise. At the end of the day, she had still bonded. She had two people that filled out applications for her $5,000 per month program. One of them she’s negotiated a deal where it’s going to be $1,500 a month and a percentage of sales. She’s got an $18,000 sale. What did she spend on that to market it? $750.
That’s about right. I’ve been on Summits where I show up and I’m disappointed like, “There are only nine people on this call.” Four or five of them will buy because they’re your serious people who need help. While you’re sitting there thinking, “This is going to be a waste,” it turns out to be a good thing. The only event I’ve done this 2020, we have not sold anything on. The Piece & Pivot was right when COVID hit. We were very careful. Nobody was allowed to sell anything.
Be real and be fun, and people will buy into you. Click To TweetWith the OpportunityThon, we did the same thing. We did that specifically to give people the mindset that there’s opportunity everywhere. We even had a song written, which opportunities of it was part of the lyrics. Will I let them sell? I let them make a knocker that was so crazy stupid that people would say, “Thank you. You’re amazing.” We had five speakers that are bringing in ten offers and $3,000 in sales is nothing significant. That wasn’t the intention. We talk about that when I train because it is a reason for why we do what we do. The beautiful thing is when we do it right, people say thank you. They’re enthusiastic. They will find the money.
The other side of the coin is that even with Pam’s first event with eight people on board, she was thrilled. I’ve got her on video. It was a whole macro transformation and tears of joy and relief too. They will schedule the next one. It’s an amazing transformation. I see this happening to my students all the time. For the attendees, you’ve got an intimate situation. If you’re in a group of say ten people, you’re almost one-on-one, which is stunning. You’ve got to do your first to get to your second. It’s like software, you got to get to version 1.2. You can’t get that 1.2 unless there’s 1.0. I encourage you to do your first event. We’ll guide you through all that because there is massive amount of fear. There’s all that stuff. It’s not my first PRIDE event but it’s 66 people registered. I was humiliated. I was like, “I’m teaching this, I should’ve had thousands.” That thousands would cost you a massive amount of money.
It’s quality not quantity.
That’s the point. Here’s the thing, the people that were on when I made the offer, they did love the stuff. I’ve been doing this for years. It was what was expected. I didn’t do all of it but here’s the point, I spend zero money on advertising. My team is marketing and collaborating. On the third week, they’re going, “What’s your ad spend?” I said, “Zero.” They’re like, “What? We spent $100,000.” I spent nothing but I had 66 so there’s beauty in that. Size does not matter in this case. Quality is what matters. Getting that right audience in there, you can make a fortune.
Here’s the beautiful thing. I love this part. Once your job is done, you can stop doing all the rest of the peripheral BS you’ve been doing, all the crazy stuff that’s technical. Think about this. If you’re able to do an event, let’s say 50 people in the room, 10% of them enroll. You should be doing twenty minimum. With ten people and you have $5,000, that’s $25,000 in a weekend. You can do it in one day with something at a lower price. How many of those you got to do over the course of a year to make a lot of money?
I was traveling and speaking on stage. I would do free lectures twice a day for 3 to 4 days a week then I would fulfill what we sold in that three-day lecture, and did a three-day event ten days later. I was doing it all the time throughout the US. Three weekends of the month, I was doing three-day events. I made a fortune for everybody else, not for me. Now, it’s mine or it’s yours. You do one event a month or we’ll do bigger numbers. I’m talking small numbers because you’re just getting started. We’d have a couple of people in the room with a $10,000 offer and sell even 10%. Do the math. That’s a couple of hundred thousand dollars in a weekend. The math doesn’t lie. You got to get there.
I don’t want to freak people out and go, “I can’t do this. It’s not working.” That’s bullshit. The thing is you got to get to the first one to get those two legs to get the confidence. Remember, when you got a bicycle and your like, “I can’t do that.” There’s training wheels and you’re like, “I still can’t do it. I’ll fall.” You get up and you’re like, “What was that about? It’s like a roller coaster.” You’re like, “I don’t want to get on.” I got to the top of you. Now, you’re screaming and were scared to death. You go down, you scream, and your hands are up like this. You get up and you focus. What do you say? “Let’s go do it again.” That’s what this is.
Some people barf but we’re going to assume that people aren’t going to barf here.
Nice Guys Finish First
She barfed before she goes on. She’s been doing this for decades, and she’s got terrified but she still does it. There is that fear and there’s also a lot of excitement. You’ll have the excitement for everything. This time it’s fresh, new, and different audience. The fun part of it is I’m looking at you and you smile. You can see them. You can call them out and you can talk to them. It can be more intimate. People have also been seeing it. It’s more intimate than they’ve ever experienced because here’s the thing. When you’re in a ballroom of this 5,000 people, you only see the first few rows. There are lights. They don’t see you either.
Now, I’m like, “I see you and I can talk to you.” I look up to the camera and I’m pointing out, “Julia, I see you.” I see it when somebody is yawning or whatever. You can be cheeky as you want and it’s fun to do. People call them virtual events. These are real. I call them beautiful event. Virtual means it’s not real. This is real work. My mom and I talk every day. Sometimes, more than once a day. We’ve always had ever since I left the States years ago. We’ve always had this communication. This is our reality. When I go back to see her in Florida, we’re connected.
This is our reality and it’s real-time, close, connected, and dedicated. Do you mean having a telephone call isn’t real? It’s always been real. Now we just have videos of it. We get to be connected and people make friends. We did an event and we had five people presenting, a team of five plus one of our speakers, and they did it as a team. They came out to do the next one. They’re bonded from five different countries. We had New Zealand, Australia, Singapore, Hong Kong, and the Philippines. All different presenters are my students.
You made communities you never could have done before. If you’re not excited about this, I’d say something was wrong with you. This is the most exciting thing. This is the biggest opportunity ever because the ability to serve people on a global basis is huge. The audience that you may never be able to do before, it’s amazing. By the way, it’s 24-hour business. If you’re a night owl, do your programs at night. I did a daytime show for the first time in forever because we did it for Asia Pacific. Otherwise, typically I’m doing USA time zones and it’s like, “It’s an all-nighter. Pull up the lights.” I’m going to do it. That’s it.
Where do we find your program? One of your three days is coming up very soon.
PRIDE is coming up on the 22nd, 23rd, 24th. It’s a Friday, Saturday, Sunday January 2021. You can go to JoinPRIDE.com to get some details on that. I also have some gifts for you as well. I’ve love giving away stuff. I have a book called Nice Guys Finish First. It’s a great book.
Ken, thank you. As usual, it’s always great. I’m so excited. I didn’t even notice until now. He put a shirt on for this. Normally, he starts running around in a T-shirt, he doesn’t comb his hair, and he’s got his glasses on. I feel so privileged that he dressed for me. Thank you.
I adore you. Thank you for the opportunity. If this interests you, check out the link, JoinPRIDE.com to get you there. We love to see you. It’s an amazing event. Planned three outrageous days. It would be awesome.
Thank you.
Important Links
- Superbrand Publishing – YouTube
- PromoteProfitPublishQuiz.com
- OpportunityThon
- LiveConferenceTV.com
- www.WealthSpringUsa.com
- Ken Krell – LinkedIn
- Peace & Pivot – YouTube
- JoinPRIDE.com
- Nice Guys Finish First
About Ken Krell
For over a third of a century, Ken Krell has inspired thousands of people from all over the world by sharing powerful ways to create wealth, prosperity and happiness in their lives.Love the show? Subscribe, rate, review, and share!
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